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As programmers adopt test-driven development, they are going to prevent many defects that would have escaped to testers. Programmers that write unit tests just after programming are going to find many of the defects that would have escaped. Keep in mind that the programmer tests only check what the programmer thinks the code is supposed to do. The tests do not assure the code meets the customers’ needs. But making sure the code is doing what the programmer thinks it is supposed to do is needed for high quality systems. They work on purpose, rather than by the accident of offsetting defects.

Testers, and the whole team, are responsible for making sure the product does what they think the customer needs. These are different tests, they cover more code per test as well as checking the interactions between modules. As testers adopt automated testing, they need different skills than the manual tester that is following a script or exploring. Some adopt Acceptance Test Driven Development. For testers in this environment, the world is changing. Changing for the better with the intellectual challenges of automation, keeping the cost of retest low, and reducing the repetitive, error prone and boring manual tests. Not all manual tests go away, but we work to automate what is repetitive. In addition ATDD moves testers upstream from reacting to the code written to specifying system behavior by example.

All that said, most of the world of software development still practices Debug Later Programming and manual test, the same practices I used in my first job as a programmer. Congratulations for using 1979 programming techniques! We’ve learned a lot since then.

For some adopting TDD and ATDD is changing their world. For most it is not. There is so much legacy code out there, as well as people and organizations that do not know how or why to automate their tests, that the status quo of testing will likely have a long life.

Kent Beck told me years ago, if the code does not need to work, then there is no need to test it. He continued and observed, why bother writing it if it does not need to work. Since hearing that and discovering how frequently I make coding mistakes, I want thorough tests.

Maybe you are asking yourself “I’ve got integration and system tests, why do I need unit tests?”. The answer is simple, simple math.Continue reading →